GC PRO ADVISORY BOARD: Marcus Miller

Getting to know Marcus has been an absolute pleasure. He is one of the most talented and respected artists in the world. He is a gifted musician, a world-class producer and one of nicest guys you’ll ever meet. His style and feel are incredible. I became aware of him when "Tutu" (Miles Davis) came out. I have been a disciple ever since.

Marcus in a rare moment of relaxation at Hannibal Music, his Santa Monica, California studio. On movie scoring while on tour: "We’d pull up to the next town, I’d pull in my hotel room, I’d have my stuff set up in 15 minutes, and I’d work on the scene until it was time for sound check. It’s exciting. You’re on the road, you’re at some big jazz festival, you run into this great horn player, guitar player. 'Hey come play on this movie thing I’m doing.'" Marcus working with his favorite recording app, Logic. For some reason, when we play a great Fender Jazz Bass, we still don't sound anything like Marcus. "I came down and played, and literally within two months, I was booked solid all day long, all week long, doing sessions. It was a time in New York where there weren’t any machines. Musicians did everything." Marcus gives us an impromtu performance (man, we have cool jobs). He's playing a unique Marco acoustic bass built in Spain.

GC Pro: We have the pleasure of sitting down and visiting with Marcus Miller here at Hannibal Music, his personal studio in Santa Monica. Let’s start with a little bit of background...most of us know a fair amount about your career, but where did it all begin? How did you get the bug? MM: Well, my father is an organist in the church. And his father was an organist in the ministry. And my father’s cousin was an organist/piano player. He ended up playing with Miles in the Fifties. His name was Wynton Kelly. So, I come from a pretty musical family. Music was always around, and I was always fooling around on my dad’s piano when I was really young. And when I was ten, we had gotten into it because Michael Jackson ad his brothers had just hit the scene, and it was just so exciting to see kids making great music. Right then and there, I got off into it. I started playing bass a couple years after that; I was maybe 12 or 13 years old. I’d been messing around with a lot of instruments. I was playing clarinet in school, I was playing the piano at home, I was playing the saxophone in dance bands. But once I played the bass, I said, "Man, this is it for me. I like this one." I was playing all the old-school R&B at the time. You kind of know when you’ve found your space, and that was it for me. GC Pro: You were raised in New York, right? MM: Yeah, born in Brooklyn but we moved to Jamaica [Queens] when I was ten, so I started into my music thing when I was in Jamaica, Queens, which is great place to get into music, at least at that time. All the houses in Jamaica had basements, unlike Manhattan. If you grew up in uptown Manhattan, there were no basements to rehearse in. Jamaica was perfect. There were a lot of kids, and everybody had a basement, and every basement had a band. You could walk down the street in Jamaica, Queens, man, and hear this band practicing their stuff, and then you go a block down and hear another band. It was a pretty cool time to be a young musician. GC Pro: A bunch of talented people have come from there... MM: Yeah, man! Let’s see...I went to Music & Art High School, which was actually in Manhattan, but in high school I met Omar Hakim. Omar lived in Queens like I did, in Jamaica. Omar began to introduce me to all these great musicians who lived right there in Queens. Tom Brown, and Bernard Wright, and Donald Blackmon and Lenny White, and Billy Cobham actually was from there, or spent a good amount of time there. Edwin Birdsong. Just a whole bunch of incredible musicians. We kind of became like a little fraternity there in Queens. We would go from club to club and sit in with each other. It was really cool. GC Pro: When did jazz become a serious passion for you? MM: I’d been playing R&B for a couple years, and was into James Jamerson and Larry Graham and those guys, the R&B guys. Then, I heard Stanley Clarke, and maybe a year later I heard Jaco Pastorius. Like all the other kids, I’d sit there and try to learn their solos, and lots of times I would get their solos. But I realized I didn’t know why they were playing the notes that they were playing. It was like, "Okay, once they’ve done it, I can maybe try and learn it, but how do I create something like this on my own?" And somebody said, "Well, you gotta learn jazz." So I joined the Music & Art jazz band. Met a couple of great musicians who took me under their wing. One guy was Kenny Washington, who was a drummer from school and playing on the straight-ahead jazz gigs like with Betty Carter and people like that. He took me to his house and gave me a whole history of jazz. Really kinda brought me up to speed on that side of it. So within a year or two, man, I was kind of well versed in both the discipline of jazz and R&B, and I loved them both. But I think my dream was always to combine the two. To learn both of them really well. See if I could come up with an interesting mix of R&B and jazz. GC Pro: Your records have intense grooves and all kinds of funk stuff going on but serious jazz sensibilities as well. MM: You know, there were groups that were doing that in the Seventies, like Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters, you know. And Weather Report. So, that was like the first music that I really got excited about. Even Earth Wind and Fire, they had all the jazzy stuff going on in their music. So I knew that’s what I wanted to do, so I’ve kind of been on that path ever since. GC Pro: So as your knowledge increased and your chops became more versatile, what led you to the session world and the gigs with Sanborn and Miles? MM: I was about 16 or 17 when I went on my first big tour with Lenny White, with his fusion band. He’d left Return to Forever maybe a year before that. GC Pro: This was right after fusion jazz became a distinct genre? MM: Yeah, when fusion was still pretty hot, you know? And so I played with Lenny’s band, but I had to take a semester off of college to do it. And I made a promise to my dad that I’d just take a semester off and come right back, get back to school, which is what he wanted for me. Which is what I knew I should be doing. But I had a great time on the road with Lenny. I played all these different cities and it was great. Anyway, I went home and...so now I’m back at school. What do I do? I’ve already kind of become a professional musician. GC Pro: You had a taste of the real pro life. MM: Exactly. So I was playing with a flute player named Bobbie Humphrey. And she wasn’t touring extensively like Lenny; she was more like New York, Philly, Boston, that kind of stuff. But she did an album, and the producer was Ralph McDonald. I said to Bobbie, "Look, I got a song, would you like to hear my song?" She heard the song and she liked the song, and she said, "I’m gonna ask Ralph to let me record this song on my next album." And she did. Ralph agreed that they’d do the song, and she convinced Ralph to let me play bass on the song. So I came in and played bass on the song. Ralph McDonald, Steve Gadd, Eric Gale and all these great New York session guys. It was pretty uneventful. I played what was necessary for the song and left, and Anthony Jackson took back over for the rest of the album. A year later, Bobbie did another album with Ralph, and I wrote another song, and this time I put a bass solo in the song (laughs). So I gave myself a chance to play. After that, Ralph said, "Man, can you read music?" and I said, "Yeah, I can read." He said, "No, really, can you read music," and I said, "I can read excellent." A couple of weeks later, man, Ralph’s partner Bill Eaton called me for a jingle for a commercial in New York. I came down, and played, and literally within two months, I was booked solid all day long, all week long, doing sessions. Word of mouth would take me from gig to gig. It was a time in New York where there weren’t any machines. Musicians did everything. As a bass player, a lot of guys couldn’t read that well, because bass isn’t an instrument that you learn formally. It’s usually an instrument that you kind of pick up. So, there were only a few bass players that could play with the right feel, but could read music at the same time. Will Lee. Anthony Jackson. Francisco Centeno. Neil Jason. And now there was myself. There were only five or six guys, really, who could do the versatile thing in New York that were necessary that we do. The next thing I know, I was just going from studio to studio, and I was like 18, 19 years old. It was cool, man. A lot of my boys from Jamaica would say "Why you playin’ that bullshit music from commercials and stuff?", but I said, "Man, you get so much experience. You play with so many different people and you see how different people operate". GC Pro: There’s nothing like that experience. MM: And then after awhile, the musicians who would be doing the jingles would recommend me to do record dates. And the next thing I knew, I’m playing on a lot of different records. That was a great experience. Just seeing how different people work. The next thing I knew, I was on the scene. It’s pretty cool, man. GC Pro: That’s incredibly cool. MM: You didn’t really have time to think. You didn’t have time to sit home and prepare what you’re going to play at the next session, because you didn’t know what the next session was going to be. So you learned to think on your feet. You learn to figure out what’s going to make a song sound better. I realized just the other day, I said, "Man, I sat all day long with headphones on, listening to my sound with headphones." Now how many people get to do that? Listening to your sound that carefully? GC Pro: Becoming intimately familiar with every nuance of your playing and tone... MM: I knew every note on my neck. Which one buzzed, which one lasted longer, which one didn’t last as long. Which note made the meters peak. All these things that a lot of guys don’t get to do. I was just thinking about this the other day. It really made me an expert on my own sound. I know what works on my bass. And I wasn’t a guy who switched basses a lot. I basically played the same ’77 Jazz Bass on everything. I got enough different sounds there to work whenever I needed it. Just that alone was worth it. So, it was a pretty cool thing when I got an audition to try out for the Saturday Night Live band in that time period. I got in that band and I met David Sanborn in that band. Buddy Williams played drums. George Wadenius played guitar. Sanborn played sax. That was a great band. Meeting Sanborn there, we got tight, and we began working together. I began to go on the road with him. I met Luther in that time period too, because he was a background session singer, so we’d run into each other all the time. GC Pro: Were you already composing quite a bit at that time as well? MM: I was writing my tunes. I wouldn’t call it composing (laughs). I was coming up with stuff. But it was cool, man. I had these relationships with these guys who were playing in their groups. So I’d just hand them a tape. I handed Sanborn a tape. It wasn’t intended for him to listen for his own album. I wanted him to hear what I was writing. "I’m gonna do an album one day. What do you think about my songs?" He said, "I want to do all these songs." He took the whole tape and had me re-record it for his album! GC Pro: That’s incredible. You were still just a kid. MM: It was a pretty cool experience. So I think that whole thing started in ’77, ’78. And for about three or four years, I was hitting it hard. In ’82 I got a call from Miles, who was coming out of retirement and asked his saxophone player Bill Evans, "Who’s a hot, young, funky bass player around here?" Bill said, "You need to call Marcus up." I got a call from Miles and came into the studio and started recording with him, and that began that relationship. GC Pro: That was Tutu? MM: No, it was way before Tutu. It was called "The Man With The Horn". It was his first album that he did when he came out of retirement. So now, I’m doing these sessions, jingles all week. On the weekends, man, I’m running out with Miles. Luther and I, that stuff was starting to heat up cause we were writing songs, and we had a hit with Aretha Franklin. We had a hit with Luther himself. So I’m doing all this stuff at the same time. It’s a pretty beautiful period. I eventually left Miles’ band because I really wanted to get into my songwriting career, wanted to spend some time in the studio. He gave me his blessing. Went in the studio, began to produce David Sanborn, working on stuff. And I ended up actually coming back to Miles a couple years later, but this time with the new skills I’d developed as a producer and a writer. And that’s when "Tutu" was, in ’86. And that was a beautiful experience. GC Pro: Amazing piece of work. I’d seen your name on liner notes before that, but that album is what made me realize you were one of the most talented humans in the world... MM: (laughs) It was funny, because I didn’t really realize this at the time...by the time I did Tutu, which was ’85, ’86, I had been doing it musically really heavy for seven years. I was on everybody’s record. I was on Elton John and Paul Simon and Grover Washington Jr. and Peabo Bryson and all sorts of stuff. But it was through my work with Miles that a lot of people discovered me for the first time. So, for a lot of people, I just came out of nowhere. "Where’s this guy been hiding?" Well, I’d just been in studios doing my thing. Miles helped introduce me to people. GC Pro: That was an amazing collaboration. What a place to really hone your production chops. MM: Yeah man. Well, the thing about it was that you knew everyone was listening. GC Pro: Right. MM: When you’re working with Miles, it’s not like you just did something that might be good and no one will ever hear it. GC Pro: And you also have a responsibility to do amazing stuff. MM: And the freedom. "Just do your thing. Let me know when you need trumpet." (laughs) But do your thing. You knew it was Miles so it’s not like it’s ever gonna be too deep. Just do whatever you can imagine. Beautiful situation. GC Pro: From those times, you’ve done a number of amazing solo records. You won a Grammy a couple years ago for Best Contemporary Jazz Record. You’ve also gotten into movie work, the scoring business. MM: Yeah. GC Pro: What led you to that? MM: Probably around ’87…no, later, ’89. A guy named Reggie Hudlin called me. He said, "Listen, man, I’ve followed your music for years. I just got out of NYU film school, and New Line Cinema picked up my movie which was my thesis for NYU. They’re gonna turn it into a full feature-length movie. I’d like you to do the music for the movie." And I said, "Well, I don’t really do that." I’d done a couple…I did Siesta with Miles, which was kinda like this alternative movie. But I hadn’t done any kind of mainstream movies. And I told him that. He said, "Don’t worry. I know all your records. You’ll be fine. I’m sending you a tape. Let me know how it goes." GC Pro: (laughs) MM: So he sent me the tape. The movie was called House Party. It featured Kid and Play who were two popular rappers in ’89. I just jumped in. Lenny White helped me out. We just jumped in and learned about synching, learned about all these different things. Reggie’s next movie was an Eddie Murphy movie called "Boomerang", which I also did. And that was a very successful movie too. And the next thing I know, man, I’m getting calls from other people who had seen the work. It’s funny. Now, I’m doing movies with directors who say, "Oh, man, I grew up on Boomerang". That’s something that they use as a reference point. To me, it seems like it just happened a few years ago, but it’s been long enough for people to have heard it as a teenager and become a movie director. But that’s how I got into it. I’ve been trying to balance the thing. What happened was from getting my musical start in New York the way I described it, where I was doing sessions, playing with Miles, Roberta Flack, Sanborn, all at the same time…I kinda got used to doing a lot of things at the same time. I was never a guy who was like, "This is what I’m doing now." I was just kind of doing music...whatever I could handle at the same time. Sometimes it gets tough. Know what I mean? GC Pro: Absolutely. MM: I think if I do one project only, I really over-think it. I put too much brain energy in it and destroy it. It’s usually better for me to flow with a bunch of different things. GC Pro: When you’re doing a movie, do you focus on it completely? It would seem like you would have to. Also, how would you compare doing music for film to just doing music? MM: The difference between doing music for a film or music for an album or CD is that music for a film is a supportive thing. There are a couple of areas where you might be able to Assert yourself and have people really dig the music. But most of the time, scoring is just about bringing people’s emotions out without them really knowing what you’re doing. Just kind of helping the scene. So you gotta kind of give yourself to the movie. When you’re doing a CD, it’s all about what your emotions are and what you’re trying to say to people. When you’re doing a movie, you’re trying to help a director say whatever it is he’s trying to say to people. So it’s a little different that way. The thing I dig about it is that because I have to give myself to the movie, it forces me to use colors that I might not normally look for. Using the strings, using the woodwinds. Or using accordions. Whatever it seems like would end up being appropriate to the scene is what I end up getting into. And I’ve ended up bringing some of those instruments into my album work. GC Pro: You discover you really enjoy these new textures... MM: Exactly. On M2, I used a string quartet with a lot of cello and viola...instruments that I really wasn’t that connected to. I also used a slide on the guitar, a bottleneck, cause I had done a movie for Reggie Hudlin called "Serving Sara", that took place in Texas. I had to use a lot of those instruments. So it starts to feed off of each other. And I get inspired in different ways. GC Pro: Very cool. MM: The way I usually go about doing the movie scene is that I really just look at the scene over and over again, and then I just go to the piano and start improvising. I know some composers, they look at the screen and then they walk away from the movie, and they sit down with a pencil and music manuscript paper. And they actually write themes that way. For me, being a jazz musician, it’s so much easier to just watch the film as it’s going by... GC Pro: And just let it flow. MM: Yeah. And once I’ve let it flow, I look back at what I did and pick out the themes that I think will work, and try to develop them and get them a little bit more structured. But first thing is just to kind of vibe. GC Pro: Do you have to focus all of your energy for a period of time when you’re working on a film? MM: For a period of time, particularly if it’s a real creative part and you’re really writing. You gotta give yourself to it. But as soon as I get that done, I’m trying to add some more bass work. I did my last movie on the road. I had a G4 laptop- GC Pro: While you were touring with your band? MM: Yeah. I was in Europe. We’d pull up to the next town, I’d pull in my hotel room, I’d have my stuff set up in 15 minutes, and I’d work on the scene until it was time for sound check. GC Pro: What software do you use? MM: Logic. I have a G4. I use an 828 interface, or an M-box...I’ve been going back and forth. A little Oxygen keyboard which is way too small to be scoring movies, but I kind of dig it! It’s great. It really worked well, man. I’d get to town, I’d work until sound check, and then I’d do the gig. I’d bring my laptop with me to the gig cause I ended up starting to play that little 2-octive Oxygen 8 on the gig too. With Logic, just triggering stuff and having a good time. Then I’d pack it up, go back to the hotel and work all night on my movie until it was time to get on the bus. I’m still kind of doing the multitasking thing. But it’s exciting. You’re on the road, you’re at some big jazz festival, you run into this great horn player, guitar player. "Hey come play on this movie thing I’m doing." So I’ll have my little hotel room as my studio, and I’ll have cats coming through. GC Pro: That’s excellent. MM: Hotel rooms have pretty decent acoustics and they’re pretty flat. They don’t ring or anything. So you can so whatever you need to do. GC Pro: So tell me how technology has affected your life? You’ve built your own studio here which is fully decked out with a Euphonix console, lots of great mics and outboard gear. What was your progression with gear and learning engineering yourself? MM: I started off with a TEAC 4-track, back in the day. I actually started out with two cassette players. Playing the drums on my lap and then playing the recording of my "lap drums" and playing bass along with it, recording on the second cassette player. Then I got the TEAC 4-track, which was a big major step forward. Then, it was drum sequencers and all that stuff in the early ‘80s. About ’88, I was...you know Effanel? GC Pro: Yeah, Randy Ezraty’s mobile recording truck... MM: Randy was updating his truck. I bought the old equipment out of his truck. GC Pro: That was the core of your first studio? MM: I set it up in my basement. I just really got into it. I had an old Sony MCI machine, and I had the Sound Workshop board which was fantastic. And I got into it. You start buying gear, you started getting into it. And that progression lasted until about five years ago when all the computer stuff started kicking in. I really couldn’t jump on the digital audio thing until it was a little less brittle sounding. Once the converters got better, I got into it. My first digital audio workstation was a PARIS, which at the time was being made by Ensoniq. I was playing Ensoniq keyboards, and the guy at Ensoniq said, "Hey, try this digital audio thing." And I got into it, and I liked it so much because the first thing that happened was I was doing vocals. I recorded vocals for somebody, I forget who the singer was, but I put auto-tune on it, and it put the vocals in tune, and I couldn’t believe it. I was like, astounded. GC Pro: Like magic. MM: There had been so many times, I’d get a great singer in, and they’d sing a great take but there’d be one note that’s flat and I can’t let it go. I’d have to do all this stuff with digital delays and harmonizers to fix the note. And I’d eventually do it; I was pretty good at it. GC Pro: Yeah, but it was a project to fix one note... MM: So I just put this little auto-tune...I didn’t put it up high so it would grab every note. But I just put it on subtly and wow, it was incredible. The other thing that blew my mind was having done movies for a few years, the director would inevitably call you up and say, "Marcus, we, uh...lengthened the scene by 20 seconds." Right? You’d have to get all the instruments back, you’d have to record 20 seconds, and then you have to get razor blades and do that whole thing. And hope that the edits work. Well, the first time I did a movie with digital audio...I actually cut and paste, man! It was seamless. And I was like,"You know what? This is good." I’ve been around long enough where I’ve seen technology come and take over the music a few times. And I saw the disco thing come and go, where drummers made a living playing the same beat over and over again. I saw that die because drum machines came and everybody overdid it. And when drum machines came out, everything sounded like a computer; all the music was really stiff. So I’d seen these kind of things happen before where I know that you can’t let the equipment take over your music. It was always important for me to learn the equipment really well so I could manipulate it. GC Pro: Use it as a tool. MM: And not let it dominate my sound. When you hear my records, I don’t want you to go, "Sounds digital, sounds like he did it in Pro Tools." I want it to sound like music. I don’t want you to even really think about what I recorded it on. But the recording concept can be made easier by the stuff. It makes it so much easier if you know what you’re doing. GC Pro: When you’re in the studio, what are some of your indispensable pieces of gear? What can you not live without? MM: I don’t think I could do without Logic anymore. I mean, I would do it; I wouldn’t be happy about it. The thing I like about Logic and the thing I like about my laptop is that I’m traveling a lot, on the road a lot. Even when I’m here at the studio I still work on the laptop, because when I leave, I just want to close it, grab my hard drive and go. I don’t want to have to transfer or do whatever I have to do… [At this point in our conversation with Marcus Miller, our tape ran out…oops! This goes to show why we don't record people for a living and instead sell gear to people who are more capable of such things.]